Many vegetables have a skin which cannot be used as a food because of its indigestible nature. Pumpkins and squash are examples of such vegetables. These also have a central core comprising pips embedded in stringy material. The pips, the skin and the stringy material all have nutritional value but are currently discarded because it is not possible adequately to process them commercially.
Apples and pears have skins and cores with pips in them which are discarded even though they have nutritional value. The reason is again that the skin and cores cannot be adequately processed commercially. Oranges and grapefruit are further examples of agricultural products which have skins and seeds that are discarded because they cannot be adequately processed commercially even though they have nutritional value.
In the production of wine, the skins and pips of the grapes are discarded as current methods of pressing do not convert these into a form in which they can be used further in the wine making process.
Apart from the obvious waste of products that have nutritional value, there is also the problem of disposing of the waste. As an example, in the production of orange juice, many tens of thousands of tons of skins and pulp have to be disposed of. Likewise, huge quantities of grape skins have to be dealt with during the relatively short grape picking period.
PCT specification WO 2012/162707 discloses apparatus which pressurises raw organic products and causes rupturing of the cell walls of the product. The resultant product has a cream like consistency and contains, in accessible form, not only the nutrients which are in those parts of the organic products which would hitherto have been considered as edible but also the nutrients from the parts of the product previously considered unusable.
An object of the present invention is to provide improved apparatus for processing organic products in a way that eradicates waste or at least radically minimises waste and enables more of the nutritional value of the raw product to be accessed.
Whilst it is envisaged that preferably whole fruit or whole vegetables will be processed, it is possible to remove those parts which are inherently edible and only process the parts that would otherwise be discarded.
In the minerals industry, mineral bearing ore is ground using apparatus such as ball mills. The ground material is then treated with, for example, an acid in the process known as leaching to separate the minerals from the ore. The efficiency of the leaching process is dependent on the particle size of the ground ore. The smaller the particles, the more efficient is the leaching process.
Another object of the present invention is to provide apparatus which reduces the particle size of mineral bearing ore in preparation for its further or simultaneous processing to separate the mineral from the rock in which it is dispersed.